Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

No it hasn't. It dropped for a while but has been growing. Even all-ages has been up since summer 2011, and that includes retiring baby boomers. Prime age has been on a upward trend for a bit longer but is basically the same pattern.

The latter is back to mid-1990s levels. The former isn't, because of the aforementioned retiring boomers.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I don't really see much point in arguing about hypothetical Thomas decisions we might not like. Obviously, a problem with a legal regime where anything goes unless it's motivated by the wrong reason is that people can still act for the wrong reasons if they just find some way to plausibly hide it.

Without defending NC Republicans, I don't think they had any real interest in gerrymandering Republican and independent blacks out of their districts. But they didn't think there were many of them, and they couldn't figure out who they were, so they used race as a proxy for political party since it's easier to identify. Next time, they'll do the same thing but pretend to be doing something else. If you don't think courts should be policing routine legislative decisions, how does a judge do her job here?

dueling economics statistics is even more fun than defending Justice Thomas
 

I put up other data, but will replace it with this observation: Since 2000, prime-age participation goes up during recoveries, but not enough to recapture what is lost in downturns. So it looks like a secular downward trend. You can see something different if you look at shorter periods.

Re: dueling economics statistics is even more fun than defending Justice Thomas
 

That's fair. Although I guess I see it as late-90s dot com boom levels as being unachievable absent something like the dot com boom. I think something like the pre-1991 and pre-2007 recession peaks, both right around 80%, as being the realistic ceiling. We're currently about a point and a half from that.

But even the late '90s peak is still under 82%.

Re: dueling economics statistics is even more fun than defending Justice Thomas
 

To oversimplify: From 1950 to 2000, we made long-term gains. Since 2000, the gains have not been enough to recover from what we've lost when things have been bad.

As Sebby will tell you, that causes political turmoil.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

This is mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%...ional_district

It goes out of its way to be really, really white. And it sucks in the liberal whites so they don't hurt anyone.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

This response is completely fucking ridiculous.

"I don't really see much point in arguing about hypothetical Thomas decisions we might not like."

Right. You've never discussed dicta in your life, I'm sure. You've never engaged in a discussion that had to do with whether an appellate court would take a case or decide one way or the other based on previous decisions or opinions by specific judges. The fact that I discussed Thomas' concurring opinion has to do with what the opinion means for redistricting and gerrymandering going forward, and the fact that Thomas cannot be counted on based on his history and who he is. He will accept any pretext when it comes to race. Whatever.

Your last sentence has nothing to do with anything I wrote. Not even remotely. If you want to engage for the sake of engaging, please find yourself a Sebby post.

TM

Re: dueling economics statistics is even more fun than defending Justice Thomas
 

I think adding a lot of women to the work force was a good thing, but not everyone agrees. Regardless, this is a stat with an upper limit where gains continuing in perpetuity are impossible.

And "normal" here is flat workforce participation, not steady increases. 1950 to 2000 is the anomaly, not the rule.

Give it another 6 months and we'll probably have recovered everything lost in Great Recession. But yeah, it took a really long time and was a really big hole and we may never get back to the dot com era.

That 1.5% is roughly 1.5 million people. That's both a lot and not all that many.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

And I'm not interested in defending him, so I don't see the point in arguing about it. Not saying you're wrong. I was just giving him props for what he decided this week, unlike Alito, Roberts and Kennedy.

Of course it does, because it goes to the question of what a judge is to do when she thinks a legislature is redistricting based on race, but can't be sure because the legislature has either said nothing to explain what they're doing, or has offered some pretext. If you're going to hit Thomas for accepting any pretext, then explain how you're going to distinguish between unacceptable pretexts and reasonable grounds for decision. It's a really hard line to draw, isn't it?

Re: dueling economics statistics is even more fun than defending Justice Thomas
 

For historians, but not for voters.

Maybe, but we're seven years into a recovery (and then there's the matter of how much people get paid for that employment).

Re: dueling economics statistics is even more fun than defending Justice Thomas
 

Voters feel whether they have a job and whether people they know have a job (also, how secure they feel about it, etc).

Workforce participation doesn't meaningfully capture that. If you apply some math, you can see that maybe it's "some but not a lot." Or you can just look at one of the broader measures of unemployment - they all tell pretty much the same story. We're back to mid-90s norms but not back to late '90s peaks. ETA: And we're very nearly back to where we were pre Great Recession.

Yes, it was a really bad recession.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Well, we know what Thomas would do. It would also seem that we know what Kagan would do.

And that's why I brought up the first prong of the test. In fact, the striking of Section 5 of the VRA, guarantees that we live in a world in which Thomas gets to jump on any pretext whatsoever, no matter how obvious. The burden should not be on the plaintiff to prove that redistricting that targets a race is racial in nature. The burden should be on the jurisdiction, subject to strict scrutiny, to prove that it is not.

TM

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I would just like to say that if Kagan started a cult, I would join.

Agree completely re Section 5. But that's not the law in jurisdictions that weren't subject to Section 5.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Whoa.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I don't get how one has a reason other than race for such districts. How can you tab "D whites live here?" Maybe it's just Michigan, but other than Ann Arbor I wouldn't think any significant white areas can be said to be strongly D. Maybe back in the day when the UAW told working class white people how to vote, but that is not where we are today. The examples I posted are carving around black areas. I get that the Rs in the state legislatures just want to gather a 90% D district, and they wouldn't care if it were all white people. But the fact is the only real way to do that is to carve out based upon race. The test can't be whether they admit it, that's silly.